Online Banking Apps, such as ANZ And Commonwealth Downin Outage
In the wake of an outage across the globe, internet banking has been affected by Australian banks.
The websites of the major banks, including ANZ and Commonwealth Bank were timing out for customers on Thursday afternoon.
As a result of a global outage hitting apps and websites, internet banking for Australian banks has been affected
Bank of Melbourne and Westpac were also reported as not accessible to customers as well as banks in New Zealand.
Customers were alerted via the ANZ app that "Something went wrong." If you need assistance contact us anytime.'
A message on the ANZ app said to customers: 'Sorry, something went wrong. We are always available to help you if you have any concerns.
A few ATMs were reported to be out of commission as well with reports of machines in stores failing in the outage.
A problem at the international content delivery network Akamai - which supplies the backbone for major online services - is understood to be the cause of the crash.
There were also reports of ATMs being out of service, with in-store machines reported an outage.
The data on the web watchdog downdetector.com.au revealed the extent of the downtime and the number of banks affected, as well as blue chip companies such as Telstra and Optus.
Amazon, Minecraft, Australia Post and the NBN website were also among the victims of the crash, according to the website.
Services began to return to normal around 3.35pm on Thursday, roughly 90 minutes after initial reports of problems.
Despite the return of other websites Virgin Australia's website was not affected.
Peakhour.io, an Australian CDN company, has stated that the most recent outage affecting these large corporations highlights the fact that any network could fail.
A Content Delivery Network is a global cloud-based computer network designed to increase the speed, security and reliability of the websites of their customers.
'CDNs typically create many copies of their customers' websites , and then store them in caches and distribute them over the world as explained by peakhour co-founder Daniel D'Alessandro
'People browsing a website will be served from their closest cache, making the website appear faster and more responsive because it eliminates the performance limitations of distance and bandwidth between the client and server.
CDNs can also increase website reliability - users will often not be aware if the actual site is down for as long as the caches remain functioning.
"Many CDN providers also offer cyber security services, which block attacks near to where they're originated. This prevents it from reaching the target.
Hackers are often attempting to shut down websites and apps by employing an attack technique known as DDOS – distributed denial of services. This is where they create a massive surge of traffic at certain weak points in a network to overload it.
The CEO added: "Akamai is a reputable company that is well-known worldwide however, as we've seen two times in the last week outages can happen to anyone.
The fact that a number of key major organisations, and the vital services they provide across Australia could be destroyed simultaneously, due to whatever reason, suggests a crucial need for redundancy.
'Companies routing their traffic through a third party whether it's a CDN, DDOS protection, or not, all require a Plan B, just like with any other critical element of their IT infrastructure.